HOW BLOCKCHAIN CAN CURB ELECTION FRAUD IN KENYA.
Kenya have been one of the many nations to experience implications brought about by misconducts and frauds in the national elections.Violence erupts everytime a major election is hosted which in turn leads to the loss of many lives and damage of properties and a solution to mitigate this issue not been found, not until the invention blockchain technology.
Blockchain technology gained fame after the success of the network which created it, Bitcoin and it has been in use in many crucial sectors from simce.Blockchain technology provides a platform for creating a highly secure, decentralized, anonymized, yet auditable chain of record, used presently in cryptocurrency systems.
This same technology could also be used to record and report votes and prevent many types of voter fraud in elections.In its most basic form, blockchain is a digital ledger. The technology draws its power from the peers—or nodes—on its network to verify, process, and record all transactions across the system. This ledger is never stored, but rather exists on the “chain” supported by millions of nodes simultaneously. Thanks to encryption and decentralization, blockchain’s database of transactions is incorruptible, and each record is easily verifiable. The network cannot be taken down or influenced by a single party because it doesn’t exist in one place.It’s not only financial transactions that work with blockchain, but any type of data transmission. This kind of system infrastructure is extremely useful for voting because a vote is a small piece of high-value data. Out of necessity, modern voting systems are largely stuck in the last century, and those that want to vote must leave their homes and submit paper ballots to a local authority. Why not bring this process online? Some have tried, but it has proven difficult to put faith in the results due to large gaps in security.
Blockchain can solve the many problems discovered in these early attempts at online voting. A blockchain-based voting application does not concern itself with the security of its Internet connection, because any hacker with access to the terminal will not be able to affect other nodes. Voters can effectively submit their vote without revealing their identity or political preferences to the public. Officials can count votes with absolute certainty, knowing that each ID can be attributed to one vote, no fakes can be created, and that tampering is impossible.